Adventure Window - Bryce Game Creator

Adventure Window is a standalone application that can create point and click adventure games similar to Myst, Riven, pre-rendered 3D escape games, interactive cylindrical panoramas and virtual visits, from your high-quality 3D renders!

ADVENTURE WINDOW FEATURES:

•Available for Windows and Android only but not for long!
•Adventure Window is a free, open source alternative to the original $140 VB6-Programmed Game Engine known as Adventure Maker.
•Unlike Adventure Maker which was made in VB6, this is being developed in 100% GameMaker Language and depending on the platform 100% Monkey Code
•100% GameMaker:Studio (and all the old versions of GameMaker since 6.1 standard) compatible with all exports! (Except you can't use panoramic frames in HTML5... yet.)
•Because it uses only one room, one object, one sprite, one font, and three scripts, you may make full length, proffessional games worth multiple hours of gameplay in the FREE version of GameMaker:Studio. Say goodbye to limited resources... At no extra cost!
•This is an official GAME ENGINE, which means you don't even need the source or even a single copy of GameMaker or Monkey (not even the free version) to create exellent games! Just edit the INI file in the package. Below the download like you can find all the information and tips you'll need in creating your first game by doing absoltuely nothing but editing an INI text file!

Currently, there is no IDE for editing the INI file. However, you may do it manually in notepad, which is recomended for advanced users only.

For Windows Users:

Download and extract the zip. The INI and frames folder are easily accessible in the main directory. To change the game's icon, use resource hacker, a free resource editor. Though you can't modify anything other than the icon otherwise you'd be modifying the GameMaker:Studio windows runner's actual exe resources, which breaks the GameMaker EULA and there goes your copy of GameMaker:Studio, 8.1 and/or GM4Mac if you are a GameMaker User.

For Mac Users:

You all can thank Glen Bourgonjon, [SecondReality Games] for the Mac export. Without his generosity this wouldn't be here anytime soon. Open the run.app file on either a windows machine on a Mac using a third party app to view the runner's internal contents and resource directories. In "AdventureWindowRunner.app\Contents\Resources\" is where the INI and other resources are located. Here you may edit the splash screen, custom icon, the run.ini and the frames subfolder. Due to a bug in GameMaker:Studio, panoramas are not supported in the Mac version.

For Android Users:
Open the android run.apk on any desktop OS using 7zip or products like it and modify the run.ini located in the assets folder and the images in the frames subfolder. You may also modify the icon and splash screen. If you extract the apk, be sure to repackage it as a zip folder while renaming the *.zip extension back to *.apk.

For All Platforms:
The INI file is what the game uses to make its games. Run.exe reads the settings and parameters in the INI and executes them accordingly. Open the INI in Notepad.

•Game Settings Parameters
->Start Frame: choose an image file you want to be your main menu title screen. The image must be in the same directory or in a sub directory of run.exe's file location.
->Draw GUI System: set to one to enable the GUI system or 0 to disable it in your project. The GUI system is not yet functional and is under development. For now keep it as zero unless you want to see a small preview of what it is supposed to be. The GUI will display on every frame except the title screen.
->GUI System Image: Under Development. The image file you want to be your custom GUI if the GUI System is enabled. Note: it must be and image that both supports transparency and has transparency enabled. Use PNG for quality and GIF for better compression and limited support for animated GUIs.
->Panorama Horizonal Angle. The initial direction of the camera for panoramic frames in your project. Use a number from 0 to 360. Decimals are supported. Zero is default.
->Panorama Vertical Angle The initial vertical angle of the panoramas in your project. Use a number from -1 to 1. Decimals are supported. Zero is default.

The rest is pretty straight forward. Play around with the INI to see what everything does. Let me know if you have any questions... I can add more to the tutorial if anyone is actually interested in trying this out or using it for their own project.

ADVENTURE WINDOW'S GOAL

My goal in this project is to revive the fame and popularity the point and click puzzle genre once had. I find it infinitely more interesting than the typical platformer or first person shooter you'd find today. In comparison to today's most popular games, I find them to be over the top bloody, mindless, and horribly thought out. My favorite genre of gaming will never cease as my favorite, as puzzle point and click adventures use a lot more logic and brain power than the act of pressing a controller buttons mindlessly, which I find primitive personally. What defines true gaming to me is the process of actually using your head logically and not just using your fingers timing things right.

MY ADVENTURE WINDOW TODO LIST:

•Create an IDE for editing the INI file!
•Background music and sound effect channels support.
•Support for polygonal hotspots, instead of the default rectangle hotspot
•Test the get and set variable parameters to ensure they are working properly.
•Native Android Device compatibility for Phones, Tablets, and the new OUYA console (coming soon, as in, this within this week!)
•Native Linux compatibility (Coming very soon!)
•Native Mac OSX compatibility (Hopefully Soon, I don't have I Mac so I rely on others for compiling and testing)
•Native Windows Phone 7 compatibility (Coming Soon, but is being developed in a software that is very limited and doesn't support Panoramas)
•Windows 8 (can't do it until I get a Windows 8 OS, and it will be in JavaScript, which isn't native)
•Windows Phone 8 (have no idea when I'll be able to get this done)
•HTML5 (all main features except panoramas will be implemented)
•Flash (again, no panoramas)
•Wii Opera HTML4 game SDK (coming not so soon, but does support panoramas!)
•XNA for XBOX 360 (might not ever get to do this, but hoping to)
•PlayStation Mobile (may or may not happen, but most likely down the road)
•GameJolt.com Achievements for all platforms except html5 and wii opera html4

Post edited by time-killer-games on February 2013

Comments

Good luck indeed. I'm not a passionate gamer but when I did them, it was adventures, like Myst and Riven, in earlier times text adventures like Colossal Cave. Never got the hang of action games (I'm too clumsy and slow).

I wish you luck, but suggest that Bryce is not the right tool for the task. I love Bryce; I have been using it for around 13 years. But it is really not up to some of the images you will see in the games you mentioned. At least not without A LOT of extra work. If you are going for a polished professional product I suggest you aim higher with your render & modeler tools. If you are going for "reasonably good" and very easy then Bryce might be the right choice.

Amongst the issues Bryce has is their skys do not look good. It also struggles with volumetrics and similar things (fuzzy, over lapping transparencies and so on). I remain hopeful these bugs/issues will eventually be addressed but since they have been there since Bryce 5 (2000) it seems my patience is not likely to be rewarded.

If on the other hand you are only advertising a free game engine, that is very generous of you.

I haven't enough CG experience to make a reply on the above game engine, however, mention of CYAN's Myst and Riven (was my favourite of all) brings back so many memories.

I recall always looking forward to playing the game (never cheating as that just ended the game quickly), and necessary solving all the puzzles (like Horo, I kinda like this type of game, as the current continuous slash-type games,I feel, must get boring doing the same old thing all the time).

Wonder if CYAN have any Myst/Riven games in the pipeline - would purchase in an instant?

But best of luck with your venture.

Edit: BTW...most won't download or open a zip file on just a mention in a forum, so perhaps you should supply a few images of the software interface, or a www site address where a viewer has the options to look into it more without having to just dowlaod a zip.

I haven't enough CG experience to make a reply on the above game engine, however, mention of CYAN's Myst and Riven (was my favourite of all) brings back so many memories.

I was a total MYST geek. Got the game. Discussed the story in alt.fan.games.myst. Know all the hidden scenes. Bought the albums. Even had a few chats with MYST sound designer Chris Brandkamp (now a director of Cyan Worlds I think), and he even sent me a free copy of RealMYST when I was doing a project around it. Good times.

Wonder if CYAN have any Myst/Riven games in the pipeline - would purchase in an instant?

There were several post-Riven games in MYST's world set, licenced from Cyan Worlds but not directly produced by Cyan Worlds. Exile, Revelation and End of Ages existed in the solo game player space, and they had Uru as a MMO, but that never really took off... I think it ran for about 3-4 years.

Riven and MYST are now available for the iPad.

===

I think this initiative could be great for people interested in prototyping games to be developed on other platforms. Mock-up, high-level demos, if you will. But this initiative seems to have three drawbacks that need to be questioned before I can get interested about it.

1) This seems to be a repackaging of a technology that has existed for 20 years: QTVR. We can do much of what has been suggested in this open source initiative NOW, in-browser. QTVR puts limited zoom and hotlink areas in cylinder or spherical map images: click a link, and you advance to the next QTVR angle. A modern incarnation of this effect is in Google Maps' Street View, though the technology might be a little different.

So, to operate 'switches' in a scene (open/close doors, operate lights, etc) like you're doing things at a location, it's just a matter of creating two near-identical QTVR movies: one with the switch up, one with the switch down, and connecting them with a hotlink.

No-one does QTVR any more. It's boring. It was an interesting artifact for its time that has some practical applications but virtually no entertaining ones.

2) This is a personal project, not a group-focused one. Like Bryce, this game project seems to be re-inventing wheels and is held together by a passion for nostalgia. So if this guy gets interested in doing something else, support for this project fails.

3) No project. As a designer, I get interested in projects. Here, the offer is: "Hey! I'm making a hammer anyone can use! You can build a house with it!" Now... I could get interested in building a house, maybe... but not by myself. And certainly not just with a hammer. I'd like blueprints, other tools, and most importantly, other people interested in building the same house.

So... this game making tool is weirdly pitched in Brycetalk. Obviously, you can use any 3D tool to create the imagery. I'd've thought the 2 good moves to make would be

a) find out if there's a demand for the product/service before getting into it, then
b) find other coders and developers willing to do an open source project together, then
c) Create a project to demo its potential.

Oroboros...great vid...but you need to take a course in driving...haha ;) Don’t know if they updated Riven since, as they would be considered somewhat ‘static’ in comparisons to the 3d look-around environments we experience today.

Have to say I’m a fan of the single-player also ever sine the first DOOM came out (ah...memories), but since then Halo, Half Life (simply excellent), Crysis, and others all have graphics to die for (takes away from the sometimes ‘crappy' storyline).

In the puzzle area again, Ms Croft (say it posh, please) was okay, too (the next one is due out soon), and Portal’s 1 and 2 were superb.

Everyone to their own in the games they play, but the slasher ones (where you continuously have to slash one monster again and again until he falls..then move on to the next monster etc.,) are ones that bore this player, anyway.

@Oroboros: if I die and no one else takes the wheel then that is the only way I can see this project failing. ;)

Update: Android is now supported. Within the next few version updates the Android-based OUYA console will also be supported. :)
Open the android zip on any desktop OS using 7zip or products like it and modify the run.ini assets folder and the images in the frames subfolder. You may also modify the icon and splash screen. If you extract the apk, be sure to repackage it as a zip folder while renaming the *.zip extension back to *.apk.

Have to admit, though, as Myst was one of my top games when it initially came out, I bought the version 'Myst URU Ages Beyond Myst' about two years ago (I think?), and while I looked forward to playing with it, I was kinda disappointed - not in the actual game and graphics, but felt that I wanted more than what it originally had been. Does that sound confusing...em, I wanted it to be more, say, modern in how one interfaced with it. But that said, it was a 2003 game, so I think I was also expecting too much - the tech wasn't as advanced for then as it is now.

It's time someone came up with a Myst, Riven game again, but let's have it be super-interfaced, super-graphics and worlds, lands, people...etc. I love games of all sorts, but some times I would like just to 'chill' in a real out-of-this-world experience, solve a few puzzles - like Myst/Riven was when they came out initially.

Speaking of games I just had to chime in with how amazing it is the way our perceptions change. I remember when Wolfenstein first hit the market, at the time it was one of the coolest looking games out there. Recently (within the last year) I was rummaging around and found my old copy of it and installed it just messing around and I found it hard to believe I ever thought it was a great game. Same thing with pong. Being that there was really not much like it at the time pong came out we all thought this was such an amazing thing. Now a days you can't even get small children interested in such a simple video game. :)

Alright. The binaries are being updated for windows and android. If you want to use adventure window effectively, please be sure to wait until I have the new version uploaded. Is there a feature or export target you would like to develop with, that Adventure Window does not yet offer? If you are interested in developing Adventure Window itself, you can modify the source with the free Enigma IDE available at http://www.enigma-dev.org/